Max,
thank you for your valiant effort on this problem of mine.

To comment on the solution you provided, i used your formulas and used
conditional formatting but received results that were not accurate.
Maybe if i emailed you the actual data set i am working with and
showed to you how your formatting worked out, it would be easier.

In the meantime, what happened was that in column B was that numbers
ranging from 1 to 16 showed up in various places. What did you mean
for this column to do? It had 1's next to values which i knew
repeated in the negative, so i dont think that count was accurate.

With column C, it basically counted each row position in order except
for about 10 or 15 rows in the middle of my long dataset in column
A.

As for the conditional formatting, since column C did not work out
exactly how i think you had anticipated, the formatting was also off.
Although the formatting did what it was supposed to do, just that
column C seemed to be of little use in this case.

I will email you the dataset so that you can see for yourself, the
results i achieved with your formulas.

What exactly did you mean for columns B and C to do? I am not the best
with understanding the code in excel.

THank you again for all of your help in this matter.